Being Optimal: Making the hard decisions

The business wants their app yesterday but you are concerned with application performance, how do you determine the right thing to focus on? In this session we will discuss the pitfalls of solely focusing on application performance and the risks of premature optimization. Let's get the thing built, then worry about how fast it is!

The goal of this session is to encourage developers to pump the breaks on prematurely optimizing their applications. Do you really need micro-services and micro-frontends or will a monolith suffice? Do you absolutely have to have Docker and Kubernetes or can you run it on bare metal servers? These techniques can quickly become quicksand to any application and dev team. We will cover that, yes it is okay to ship temporary code to production. No, you don't have to have your end game architecture of micro-services and micro-frontends set up from the get go when your customer base doesn't warrant it.

As developers, we can tend to jump into the deep end without truly evaluating whether or not our project really needs to use the latest and greatest technology. Focusing on delivering business value first, then making the code maintainable, and only after those two issues have been addressed do we focus on optimization. Knowing when to say use micro-services or micro-frontends, Kubernetes, Docker, etc. is a very important distinction to make. Being able to identify when good enough is good enough for a first release can quickly become lost in a feature avalanche, so we will be learning how to focus on that MVP1 and then iterate through versions to not only deliver business value, but not swamp the tech team right at the start.

You got serverless in my Kubernetes!

Modern DevOps seems to push for serverless or Kubernetes, pick one. But why is this the case? Why not run serverless applications on Kubernetes? In this session we will cover application development using the Kubeless open source framework to develop serverless applications that can run on Kubernetes. Come and learn how to get the best of both worlds!

Kubernetes has a reputation of having a lot of overhead in setting up your new cluster and getting things up and running. Now, in modern cloud computing we have serverless applications; Azure Functions, AWS Lambda, etc. but what would happen if we applied that same concept to Kubernetes? With the various solutions we have available to us for serverless Kubernetes, we can help remove the overhead of Kubernetes configuration and let developers focus on doing what they do best, building cool stuff and solving problems!

Micro Frontends: Not the silver bullet

Micro Frontends have gathered some steam over the past few years, but they are far from a silver bullet. In this session we will go over some ways that you can implement micro front ends, different patterns, frameworks, benefits, and pitfalls. We will also cover some examples and run through ways that you can choose which framework and tool might be best for your own implementation of Micro Frontends.

Sites and web applications are increasingly needing to be able to be quickly deployed and scale up due to wide fluctuations in traffic. To date, the backend of the application has seen a rise in micro service architecture and development allowing for quicker development and safer releases. But what about the front end? Until somewhat recently there has not been a good solution for this, to make a small change on the front end you would have to build and deploy the entire solution.

In this talk, we will take a look at the pain points of deploying a monolithic front end application and how we can address these issues by applying a micro frontend architecture and design. But, as with all solutions this is not a silver bullet. We will also cover the pain points and downsides of various micro frontend solutions and how we can go about making an informed decision on how to move forward.

You apps are under attack

Application security is becoming more and more important as our world becomes increasingly connected. But, is security being pushed aside in favor of new feature development and keeping ahead of competition? The unfortunate answer is yes, in favor of feature development and then security as an afterthought.

In this session we will go over why your application security needs to be a key part of your development focus, a few of the risks and vulnerabilities that are out there, and how you can track common vulnerabilities and make a judgement for yourself on how you will mitigate them. We will also cover some architectural patterns you can follow to reduce your attack vector.

Application development experience expected, but not required.
1-hour session.

Quantum Computing: A brave new frontier

Quantum computing has been gaining momentum in the past few years and is quickly becoming something more than a research project by PhD's. Ok, that's great, but why does this matter?

Quantum computing is more than just hype, there are multiple real world uses that provide really compelling reasons that should at least raise your interest in learning more about what this exciting technology has to offer.

In this session, we will go over the fundamentals and applications of quantum computing. From fintech, to healthcare, to online cyber security, we will go over applications and also demo some code using Microsoft Q# and their quantum libraries.